Big Cat Rescue
Lessons Learned
 Optimize your website content with keyphrases related to your mission. Spend as much time as you possibly can creating and promoting content optimized for search engines, because the return on investment—beginning with top rankings on your keywords—is limitless, Baskin says.- Considering doing the search engine optimization yourself. "You can do it yourself, save lots of money and get great results with just a little reading on the subject," Baskin says. In fact, she finds that Big Cat Rescue's homegrown Web efforts often get better results than what SEO companies promise on the phone.
- Pinpoint terms precisely. Think about how a target user would likely search for your key terms, and try to group keywords accordingly while filtering out those not relevant to you. For example, when she was advertising on the word "tiger," Baskin was careful to screen out the term when combined in a search with "Woods" (for Tiger Woods) or "Tamil" (for the Tamil Tigers).
- Accommodate poor spellers. "A big part of what we do is educate people who really need it, and most of them can't spell," says Baskin. So in targeting keywords, Baskin will often deliberately include misspellings. "That enables me to reach those people, and I don't have many competitors doing it."
- Write ads diplomatically. In writing Google ads, Baskin is careful not to put off the very visitors she most wants to reach. For example, "we want to reach people who are looking to buy a tiger cub so we can talk them out of it," she explains. "But if my ad said, 'Big Cats Make Bad Pets', they aren't going to come to my site and see why. So I might say something like, 'Meet People Who Bought Tigers As Pets' instead."
- Create "linkbait." By providing resources to reporters, college students, field biologists, politicians, zoos and teachers, Big Cat Rescue gets promoted broadly by referrals, Baskin says. The sanctuary also provides free screensavers, computer wallpaper and online games so that its message is spread virally to the people it might not otherwise reach.
- Make reciprocal links easy. To help people interested in linking their pages to Big Cat Rescue's site, Baskin has created a "Do It Yourself" link page on which internet surfers can get banners, games and videos that link back to Big Cat Rescue.
- Jump with both feet. Says Baskin, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have put more of our time and money into internet advocacy, because it has done far more to alleviate the suffering, abandonment and abuse of big cats than all of our rescues put together."
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